Tag: thesis

In the four years since my master’s thesis was published by Western Oregon University on Digital Commons, it has been downloaded 2,036 times. Oddly, though, I have not heard from readers or seen it cited. What strange times we live in! If you read my thesis, please email me@danielgreene.com or leave a comment to let me know how you used it in your research and/or practice. Thanks!

World map showing all the times my thesis was downloaded in different parts of the world in the four years since it was published online

When I wrote my master’s thesis on vague language, I often cited vague words and phrases. At first I put them in quotation marks, but the quotes cluttered the pages, and by the time I was ready to publish, I wondered if I should use italics instead. I used APA style*, so I consulted my APA Manual and I found that, indeed, you should use italics for “a letter, word or phrase cited as a linguistic example” (American Psychological Association, 2010, p. 105). Some examples offered in the APA Manual are:

words such as big and little
the letter a
the meaning of to fit tightly together
a row of Xs

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this until the day before I submitted my thesis for publication, so I had to go through a hundred pages changing “sort of” to sort of, “threeish” to threeish, and so on. I hope this little blog post saves others the time I spent undoing my errors.

* Chicago and MLA style manuals call for the use of italics for linguistic examples as well.

References

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Greene, D. J. (2013). Keeping it vague: A study of vague language in an American Sign Language corpus and implications for interpreting between American Sign Language and English. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/theses/2/

I am thrilled to announce that my thesis has been published online, available for all to read. The title is “Keeping it Vague: A Study of Vague Language in an American Sign Language Corpus and Implications for Interpreting between American Sign Language and English” and the URL is short & sweet: http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/theses/2/

Thanks to all who expressed interest in reading this work; thanks to the Master of Arts in Interpreting Studies with an emphasis in Teaching Interpreting program at Western Oregon University (WOU); and, thanks to WOU for venturing into digital publication with our program’s master’s theses. It is an honor to be the second postgraduate student to publish a thesis on WOU’s Digital Commons repository.

Please do email me@danielgreene.com with any questions or to discuss this thesis, and feel free to “talk amongst yourselves.”

References

Greene, D. J. (2013). Keeping it vague: A study of vague language in an American Sign Language corpus and implications for interpreting between American Sign Language and English. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/theses/2/

After many months of work, I am going to send the penultimate draft of my master’s thesis to my thesis committee. I will await their feedback, make changes, and hope to defend before the end of February.

I am working on my master’s thesis on vague language (VL) in American Sign Language (ASL). As far as I know, not much has been published about vagueness in ASL and nothing has been published about “VL” in ASL aside from my article in the RID Views. For my thesis, I’m doing a literature review of what has been written about VL in world languages and vagueness in ASL— even if the topic of the publication wasn’t “vagueness” per se. After a review of the literature, I will contribute a description of at least one aspect VL in ASL. My goal is to help ASL-English interpreters recognize VL and interpret it faithfully to serve the communication goals of deaf and hearing consumers.

If you know of any literature about VL in ASL—or any type of vagueness in ASL—please leave a comment. Thanks!